In the End
by scriggly
Summary: Mycroft's thoughts while he and Sherlock smoke in the cottage yard. WARNING: Explicit incestuous thoughts.


**Author's note.**

This has been haunting me since HLV aired, and I needed to get it out of my system so I can finish The Fever When I'm Beside Him.

It's an *honor* to say this has been betaed and edited by the incredibly lovely and generous dioscureantwins. Her tweaks were brilliant. Any parts containing poor writing/redundancy/confusion mean I didn't take her advice and as such are in no way a reflection on her awesome beta skills.

You breathed a new, beautiful life into this fic, dearest dioscureantwins. Thank you so much. 3

**In the End**

You're the only one who spots him slinking out of the living room, lithe and graceful, in the direction of the front door, his hand already creeping toward the pocket of his ridiculous coat. His junkie chemist is listing all the ingredients in the punch from taste while your parents watch in amusement, but that's not why you're the only one who spots your brother.

You're the only one who spots your brother because you're always, _always _intensely aware of him: a warm presence at the edge of your vision; a cold hollowness when he's not there.

You are careful not to scramble up too obviously, but you let yourself hurry after him once you're out of the living room. He's only going to smoke the one cigarette before he comes back in, and having your little brother all to yourself in the garden of your childhood home is an unexpected treat you're not going to miss.

You find him standing in the middle of the garden, one hand already outstretched with a cigarette for you. The crisp December breeze plays with his curls and smudges his cheeks and lips with pink, and heat curls in your stomach. Wordlessly, he leans closer to you, his unlit cigarette nestled beneath that perfect cupid's bow. You light it for him and you watch as he drags in a long breath, mere inches from you. His proximity, unexpected and cherished, descends upon you like a balm, a welcome reassurance that he is here and he is alive.

You want to _crush_ Magnussen and John Watson and his wife, because you know the way Magnussen works. You are the British government but you've backed yourself into a corner _because _you are the British government. You've never regretted your position before.

Because you know Magnussen's predatory focus has zoomed with lethal precision on your single pressure point in the entire world, and no prey has ever eluded Magnussen before. There is no way out of this, and it would never have happened if Magnussen hadn't been after you in the first place.

Because your beloved brother was shot six months ago, and you were the British government then just as you are now, and it didn't protect the one person you cannot bear to lose. Your brother was shot by the woman you have known all along is _not _Mary Morstan and he was left to die, and you were the British government then just as you are now, and you didn't even _know _until John called you. Your brother was shot and he flat-lined. He died while you, the British government, stood outside the room, healthy and alive, not dead. You were alive when John called to relay the news. Your fingers trembled, your knees buckled, and you cleared your throat several times before you could find your voice – while your brother lay pale and motionless on a green table. You were alive, disgustingly healthy, heart hammering, breathing in and out with your hand pressed to your chest while the doctors removed their hands and paddles from your brother's chest after his heart gave out.

And you didn't even _know._ He died, and you didn't know.

If you spend the rest of your life atoning for that, it won't be enough.

Now he is strolling the garden, so stubborn, petulant, and alive you would sob your heart out if you were both other people. But you're both only yourselves, and you need the reassurance of his voice. You know exactly what will coax him to talk, so you plaster a mildly interested look on your face before you speak. "I'm glad you've given up on the Magnussen business."

"Are you?"

_Yes,_ you think passionately. Yes. _No._ Because he has obviously not given up, and you don't know if you can take it if anything happens to him. Again. You wonder how your mouth manages to keep up a stream of perfectly normal talk when your insides are a jumbled, anxious mess. "I'm still curious, though. He's hardly your usual kind of puzzle. Why do you ... hate him?"

He whirls around, all fiery conviction and disgusted indignation, and he takes your breath away. You hurriedly tear your eyes from his lips. "Because he attacks people who are different and preys on their secrets. Why don't _you_?"

Because you're not like your brother, you think, your mouth steadily babbling away. He has compassion for those who are different that you lack, compassion his big brain refuses to acknowledge. He doesn't believe in starting wars for the greater good and he has a childlike belief that all innocent lives can be saved if he just thinks hard enough, fast enough. He rescues complete strangers and risks his graceful neck and his precious life and insists he is not a hero, and yet people call _him _a psychopath. He calls himself a sociopath to fend off the pain of being human, pining for a confused _healer, _an ex-soldier who killed for your brother one day after they met yet punched him and spilled his blood after your brother came back from two years in hell to keep John alive.

At least no one can touch him here, not with you only a heartbeat away, and your entire being unfurls with watery, feeble relief. He's here, he's with you, and he's safe.

At your mention of dragons, he looks at you. You feign staring at the garden in disinterest. You can feel his gaze still on you as he strolls closer.

"A dragon slayer," he says pensively. He peers at your face, bemused. The garden blurs when, at the edge of your vision, you detect one of his lovely little smiles, the ones he used to bestow on you long ago whenever you announced he had successfully found the pirate loot or slain the big, evil dragon. Savage tenderness rushes through you when he stands beside you and nudges your elbow with his. "Is that what you think of me?"

You remind yourself that he has no idea what such playfulness does to you. He has no idea how that smile winds you around his little finger even more tightly than you already are. "No. It's what you think of yourself," you say, and you can't help smiling.

This is the closest thing to contentment you have felt in ages, ever since you brought him back from the dead.

Just the two of you, in the garden of your childhood home, standing side by side. No obsessed megalomaniacs or infatuated ex-army doctors. His elbow is touching yours, although you know he is not doing it intentionally, his old tactile self simply emerging for one rare instant, probably at the mention of dragons. But his proximity is dizzying, and beneath the cigarette smoke, his delicious, clean, crisp scent grazes your senses and heats the blood in your veins.

You want him. You want him so badly it hurts. You're hard. You're thinking of how you nearly lost him six months ago and you're thinking of your terror that he might go after Magnussen now and still you're _hard, _and you want to save him from himself and keep him safe and look into his eyes but you also want to press your lips to his in worship, you want to comb your fingers through his curls as you so often did when he was a child and sought you out in the middle of the night to chase away the nightmares. You want to touch every precious inch of him with your fingers and your tongue, slowly, over and over until he forgets Magnussen and the dark self-destructiveness that lies under his skin where even you can't _reach._ You want to watch him munch away at the sweet treats he loves so much (he has such a sweet tooth), you want to find him silly deduction games that amuse the ever-present child in him, you want to shield him from harm and heartbreak just as you did when he was eleven, your very own little pirate and dragon slayer.

You are so drunk on his proximity that you don't even hear the door open until your mother's cry pierces your awareness. "Are you two smoking?"

Your name tumbles out of his lovely mouth effortlessly, pinning the blame on your head as he has done all your lives, and as ever you fail to conjure the slightest annoyance over it. You watch him blow the smoke out of his mouth, boyish smugness over evading blame all but written on his face. Your heart threatens to spill out of your mouth. You love him so much it hurts.

And yet he was shot, and he flat-lined. Less than three months after you rescued him from imminent death in Serbia, you let an ex-assassin get so close to your brother you almost lost him again. A familiar helplessness closes tightly around your throat.

"I have, by the way, a job offer I should like you to decline," you say, desperate for any distraction from the suffocating image of your brother in exhausted sleep, paler than the white sheets he lay under, a hole ripped inside him, as the doctor told you in monotone about your brother's miraculous survival and added that now he was stabilised and fine. As if anything could be fine now.

"I decline your kind offer," your brother replies immediately.

While you brain supplies your mouth with the requisite formal reply, your eyes follow his beautiful features. You know that he won't be able to leave the topic alone and he asks what the offer is. As if you would ever send him back to Eastern Europe.

"Then why don't you want me to take it?" He asks, genuinely baffled.

You are _stunned._

Because it's one thing for him to act as though the two of you never get along, to try to rile you at every opportunity, even to kick you out of his flat. You accept it all. You don't know if he's compensating for all the years before, the years when he _adored_ you. You accept it anyway, because you will take anything he gives you, and if he tries to humiliate you, if he kicks you out of his flat over and over, you know you will only be back the next day. The overbearing big brother act you pull off is impeccable, after all, probably because it's not completely an act. He is the one thing in this entire world you cannot bear to lose.

You have always believed he knows this. You don't know how to respond to the implication that he doesn't. Because if he's genuinely wondering why you don't want him dead…

… then you have failed on an even bigger scale than letting him get shot. Because he is _genuinely _surprised. He doesn't know that you cannot live without him, and you taste metal in your mouth. Your already feeble sense of contentment shatters as failure settles icy and thorny into your guts. There is nothing you can do to protect him from himself, you realise. All you will ever be able to do is pick up the pieces, send doctors and ambulances, stand by useless and hollow, and all of that only _after _someone else calls you and informs you that your brother was hurt and needs help. And your brother doesn't even know you want him alive.

Terror grips your heart and clogs your throat. You have failed him. He may not know it but you do.

You plaster your best deadpan expression on your face. "It's tempting," you say (because you _are _tempted to let go for once, to scream at him that you are done with nearly losing him time after time, that you cannot, _will _not lose him again, to fist your hands in his ridiculous coat and shake him until you see the self-destructiveness tumble out of his pores), "but on balance you have more utility closer to home."

Naturally, he mocks you. "Utility? How do I have utility?"

You struggle to keep the disinterested mask on your face as you reply. "Here be dragons."

Your sense of helplessness is choking you. Suddenly the cold seeps through your clothes, the cigarette tastes foul, and the sight of your brother, vulnerably human and infinitely precious , hurts unbearably. Blood and tissue and bone – he's nothing more than precious blood and tissue and bone, and there's nothing you can do to protect him because he thinks nothing can touch him.

You have to go inside before you break in front of him.

His jab at beginner smoking only makes it more glaringly obvious that his mind is somewhere else. Magnussen. He is still going to go after Magnussen, only this time his crush on John won't stave off the self-destructiveness, because John Watson is gone, no longer your brother's to dream about. He is going to go after a megalomaniac immeasurably more lethal than Moriarty and nothing will anchor him this time.

You stop in your tracks. Your failure is huge, but you can try to right one, small thing. You have spent such a long time terrified of your brother finding out _how_ you love him that you have made him forget how _much _you love him. Once upon a time he banked on that love. You were his confidante and his best friend. Once upon a time he said you were the only person who "got" him in this entire world. Perhaps a little affection wouldn't go amiss, if it can stir that. If any of that sentiment is still there. Something tells you it is. Nothing bigger than a tiny speck of the adoration and trust he once carried for you, but you know you can help it grow if you reach out to him and remind him.

Perhaps you have let him forget that when you say caring is not an advantage, you can never be referring to him.

You cannot believe this has never occurred to you before. You take a deep breath. "Also…" You swallow back the emotions roiling inside you before they spill out. (You want to remind him you are always there for him, not scare him away even farther.) "Your loss would break my heart."

He coughs and sputters, and it crushes the tiny flicker of hope that deep down he _knows_ how much you care for him. "What the hell am I supposed to say to that?"

_ That you won't break my heart. That I won't lose you. That you'll let me take care of you. That you won't die for anyone, least of all John Watson._ _That you might, one day, not find this perverted if… when I lose control and tell you how I feel. _"Merry Christmas?"

"You hate Christmas." His clever gaze is still on you, bright and sharp, and you feel the conversation spiralling out of your hands. You want to show brotherly affection, not alarm him with what looks like out-of-character behaviour, even if you've let him believe that in the first place. Even if you've helped him conveniently forget how this was never out of character for you where _he_ was concerned.

You never needed words to understand each other back then, however. Another failure. "Yes. Perhaps there was something in the punch."

"Clearly. Go and have some more."

The thinly veiled playfulness takes you completely by surprise. Apparently you still don't need words. He has accepted your clumsy offer and is making an effort himself. You are too overwhelmed by emotion to reply, and you decide to honour his generosity by giving him his few remaining moments of privacy.

As you glance at his lovely features one last time, you desperately hope that this semblance of an anchor is enough for him.

* * *

Later, shaken awake by his protégé who informs you that your brother has taken your laptop and gone "to see CAM with John", you howl with rage.

* * *

**The End**


End file.
